No matter what, you need to know what goals matter to YOU! For us goals mean having our business revolve around our lives rather than having our lives revolve around our businesses. We want more time to focus on the parts of work we want to grow, plus spend more time with our families. With that in mind, we plan out all of our vacations before putting work in our calendars. There is no squeezing it in, that time is precious and treated with respect.

Who are your target clients?

Going forward you will want target only specific work that matches your ideal clients. These are the ones that you like working with because they high revenue, high profit, or even just geographically desirable. Once you are focused on your best clients, you need to subtract the ones that take time away from them.

Focused sales

You want to make sure you know which of your products are the best fit for your business. For example, Dave currently has about 50% of his business from painting and 50% from roof cleaning and restorations. This year he will be focusing his marketing efforts on roof services instead of painting because he can make as much in one day on his roofing jobs as he does in three days of painting.

Interesting! Set your goals by percentage of market share

Common wisdom says that you should set your income goals by saying how much you want to make and then dividing it into monthly, weekly and daily goals. But what if you stopped all of that and just focused on market share. Of owning your area for all the jobs that will be purchased. What if you got 50% of all the pressure washing jobs in your town or 25% of all the roofs in your city.

At that point you are not talking about increasing by percentages, you are talking about increasing exponentially.

10X Goal Setting

If you are thinking about doing big goal setting this year, we recommend you check out Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan’s podcast 10X Talk. As we know, when you set your goals at a really high level, you start thinking of solutions that never would have occurred to you if you keep them lower.

90 Day Goals

Goal setting has really changed. In the past you could set 5-10 year goals and feel fairly secure that there would not be huge shifts in the marketplace that would disrupt your plans. Now-a-days though, you will want to schedule your goals about 90 days out. Going much beyond that doesn’t make much sense since a new product could come out that would make your current work obsolete.

Additionally, we recommend that you make 10X long term goals and then attainable 90 day goals. Having realistic short term goals means that you can reach them and actually accomplish what you are setting out to do.

For example, if you set a 90 day goal to double your business, unless you are brand new, there is little chance of accomplishing that goal. But if you set your goal to be a 10% increase in your business and do things that will lead to more customers, you can achieve it.

Also, look at what you are measuring. What if, instead of trying to increase revenue you tried to increase your profit margin by reducing costs. Just tweaking a few things could increase profitability greatly.

Written Goals

Last but not least is…write your goals down! If you don’t have written goals you are just shooting in the dark to know whether you are winning or losing. It is only by measuring how you are executing against your planned goals that you can know if you are making progress.

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Our contractors marketing podcast is for busy professional trades people who want to learn how to grow their businesses on the go. Download any of our past episodes for the latest news on how to market your business effectively and affordably... find out more